Known as the beurgeois â€“ a play on bourgeois and the word beur, slang for a French person of North African descent â€“ these new consumers are behind a rapidly expanding and highly profitable market in halal food and drinks.

With spending power worth an estimated â‚¬5.5bn a year, according to the opinion pollsters Solis, these under-40s are forcing international food suppliers to cater for their demands.

Yanis Bouarbi, 33, an IT specialist who started the website paris-hallal.com, which lists restaurants in France serving halal food, says young Muslims are at the heart of a mini social revolution.

â€œWhen our parents and grandparents came to France they did mostly manual work and the priority was having enough to feed the family,â€ said Bouarbi, who arrived from Algeria at the age of three.

â€œBut second or third-generation people like me have studied, have good jobs and money and want to go out and profit from French culture without compromising our religious beliefs. We donâ€™t just want cheap kebabs, we want Japanese, Thai, French food; we want to be like the rest of you.â€

The demand for halal products, currently increasing by an estimated 15% a year, has captured the attention of food giants such as the supermarket group Casino, which has stocked an increasing variety of halal foods â€“ mostly meat products â€“ for the last three years.

The fast-food chain Quick has a number of halal-only burger bars; the opening of the most recent caused a political storm before the regional elections last month, but the row has since blown over. Muslim corner shops selling exclusively halal foods and drinks including eggs, turkey bacon and pork-free sausages as well as alcohol-free â€œchampagneâ€, known as Chamâ€™Alal, are also flourishing.

Annick Fettani, head of Bienfaits de France, which specialises in halal duck, said: â€œUntil now weâ€™ve had to fight to sell our foie gras but today everyone wants it.â€ Bouarbi believes the halal boom is taking place because young Muslims have more money. His website now lists more than 400 restaurants in Paris and its suburbs, and he plans to expand it to other French cities.

In Parisâ€™s trendy 11th arrondissement, Les Enfants Terribles restaurant, run by brothers Kamel and Sosiane Saidi, serves halal French haute cuisine. â€œBefore, Muslims wishing to eat halal would go to a restaurant and it was fish or nothing. Now we have a choice,â€ said Sosiane, 28, who worked in the property market before setting up the restaurant three years ago.

â€œYoung Muslims have money and want to eat out like everyone else but according to their religion. The food doesnâ€™t taste any different; we have many French customers who donâ€™t even know weâ€™re totally halal. To us, that is what integration is about.â€

Like Yanis and Sosiane, younger members of Franceâ€™s estimated 5 million-strong Muslim community – with whom relations have been strained by the recent debate on national identity and threats by Nicolas Sarkozyâ€™s right-of-centre government to ban the burqa – are asserting their economic muscle. As one French website put it, halal is â€œvery good businessâ€ for French companies.